Sending cookies through an email

is it possible to put cookies in an email, or links in an email?

[kilo]

Hi I'm a newbie to the world of cookies so forgive me if this all sounds dumb...
just wondering if there is a way to pass a cookie to a user through an email or link in the email? ...as in, can a cookie for my website be sent to a users comp when they open an email or through a link they click in the email(not within the page it links to)?

Just thinking of an easy way to place cookies on the site i work on without going through placing code on every page. Since one thing we want to track is who comes from our emails, I thought maybe theres a way to send them through emails.

thanks!

[Sanenet]

No you can't. Cookies are controlled by the browser, email clients won't accept them.

One way you can track the success of email campaigns (or offline branding) is to setup either tracking links or aliases for your site. (ie, site.com?email=3, or site.net - redirecting to site.com) and seeing how many hits they get.

[kilo]

Thanks for the reply Sanenet!

Just wondering exactly how you do what you said about tracking links?

"site.com?email=3, or site.net - redirecting to site.com"

what does this exacly require?

[Sanenet]

Email test - the links from your email, instead of just going to www.site.com, go to www.site.com/index.htm?track=1 (or email1.htm, which logs to the visit and redirects to index). The idea being that at the end of the day you can track the number of times that page was called, since the ONLY time it will be called is when somebody clicks on the link in the email.

Offline branding - you run an ad in a magazine. How to track how many times somebody goes to your site after seeing the ad? Use a different domain (ie site.net, instead of site.com) for the ad. Again, since this domain is only displayed in the ad, you can see how many people typed it in.

Neither way is 100%, (people could forget the .net, just go straight to .com, they might type your domain into the browser instead of clicking on the link, etc), but hey, whats a boy to do?

[spakws]

Hi. I have a similar question to Kilo and I wanted to find out if Sanenet's solution would also work for my situation.

We would like to send out weekly email newsletters and track how many people click on the link to visit our site. The end goal is so we can compare stats from week to week and so on. I don't want to setup redirect pages every time we want to send out an email. So, off of Sanenet's suggestion, I was thinking I could put the date as the id number and we could track each newsletter that way.

For example:
www.site.com/index.asp?id=2004-11-02
www.site.com/index.asp?id=2004-11-09

Three questions:
(1) Do you see a problem w/ doing it this way?
(2) Is there a better solution for this situation?
(3) Regardless of what the id number is, will it always take the user to the site w/out blowing up?

Thx.

[hmatisse]

spakws,

Looks like that would work fine.

~Olga

[iseff]

One thing you may want to look into is a serious email campaign software suite. There are many available and almost all the good ones allow for tracking capabilities built it -- it'll do all the nice redirecting for you. Plus, they'll do open rates based on images, etc. Very good stuff.

Let me know if you need info on any of these things, just message me.

Ian